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Mass Effect 3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

*vague spoilers*

What do you do when your ending doesn’t make any sense and you’re faced with crippling plot-holes, disparate story lines, and an inability to draw a vast adventure to any kind of satisfying close? You just pretend none of it actually happened.

It’s the “and then he woke up” strategy, a solution as old as storytelling itself. And it’s the gist of the indoctrination theory, which is the best theory that’s been posited yet for why the ending to Mass Effect 3 wasn’t as bad as it sure seems like it was.

To avoid too many spoilers, it states that most of the game's ending actually just occurred inside of Shepherd’s head as the Reapers try and indoctrinate him to their will, like they did to Saren. The final choices are about whether to succumb to their influence or resist. Paul Tassi has much more extensive details.

I’m skeptical about whether or not this was the plan all along. It probably came up in meetings from time to time, and was even hinted at in points during the game. But the team wouldn’t be handling the complaints about the ending in the way that they are if they had the ace in their sleeve the whole time.

That still doesn’t mean that indoctrination isn’t the route that Bioware will take. Right now, it probably looks like the easiest way to use fan feedback to shape the ending. But it would just be that: the easiest way out. It wouldn’t address protesting fans' real complaint about the lack of choice -- it would just force us down another path that would once again require separate endings. A good delaying tactic, but not a satisfying ending for Mass Effect by any stretch.

The root problem of the Mass Effect 3 ending was that it was very hard to come up with a satisfying way to incorporate hundreds of hours of player choice into a set of reasonable, engaging, and conclusive endings. In my mind, an attempt at the “it was all a dream” solution would prove that Bioware wasn’t up to the task.

This is my opinion – I hated the ending to The Usual Suspects. I understand that many others did not.

It seems that at best, indoctrination DLC would yield two separate ending storylines– one where Shepherd is a Reaper (renegade, I guess?) and one where he isn’t (paragonish), neither of which would do much of incorporating the events of Mass Effect 2.

But a fake-out DLC of this kind might be too much to swallow. Had the events behind the indoctrination theory actually occurred in the original game, it would have been irritating. If they’re released later, as DLC, it will just be a cop-out.